Forthcoming chapter in Feminist Frontiers, 10e, edited by Verta Taylor, Nancy Whittier, and Leila Rupp. Rowman and Littlefield.

Protection is now the modal motivation for gun ownership, and men continue to outnumber women among gun owners. While research has linked economic precarity (e.g., insecurity and anxiety) to gun ownership and attitudes, separating economic well-being from constructions of masculinity is challenging. In response to blocked economic opportunities, some gun owners prioritize armed protection, symbolically replacing the masculine role of “provider” with one associated with “protection.” Thus, understanding both persistently high rates of gun ownership in the United States (in spite of generally declining crime) alongside the gender gap in gun ownership requires deeper investigations into the meaning of guns in the United States and the role of guns in conceptualizations of American masculinity. We use recently collected crowdsourced survey data to test this provider-to-protector shift, exploring how economic precarity may operate as a cultural-level masculinity threat for some, and may intersect with marital/family status to shape gun attitudes and behaviors for both gun owners and nonowners. Results show that investments in stereotypical masculine ideals, rather than economic precarity, are linked to support for discourses associated with protective gun ownership and empowerment.

This is an expert report prepared for The Joint Federal/Provincial Commission into the April 2020 Nova Scotia Mass Casualty. We summarize definitional debates surrounding how mass shootings are operationalized in existing research, address how this impacts what we are able to know about the burden of mass shootings in any society, and summarize the relationship between guns, gun culture, mass shootings, and masculinity in American society.

Relying on more expansive criteria for defining “mass shootings” than much existing research, we examine a subset of a unique dataset incorporating 7,048 news documents covering 2,170 shootings in the United States between 2013 and 2019. We analyze the descriptive language used to describe incidents and perpetrators and discover significant racial disparities in representation. This research enables a critical examination of the explanatory frames utilized by news media to tell the public who mass shooters are and journalistic attempts to explain why they occur. Data were analyzed utilizing a mixed methods approach, relying on content analysis to inductively code emergent categories of descriptions of shooters and binary logistic regressions to analyze the preponderance of descriptive categories when comparing news articles reporting on shootings committed by differently racialized shooters. Our results confirm some recent research showing that mass shooters racialized as white are more likely to be described with kind and compassionate language. With our larger sample, however, we also find that mass shooters racialized as white are additionally more likely to be described with negative language as “bad” or “evil” in comparison to shooters of color. We discuss how these data demonstrate that media reports present a more complex picture of white mass shooters for the public than shooters of color.

certain distortion in the linear trajectory of time, where we are unable or unwilling to march in the direction of modernity's promised progress. Olick of course goes much further than this, and the reader willing to work with his complex theorizing will be deeply rewarded. Given that Olick presents this part of his theorizing as schematic and tentative, one can (at risk of falling back on an outmoded chronotype!) look forward with eager anticipation to the next moment of his thinking memory.